The next generation of photography? Auto Beauty! The Panasonic DMC-FX77/78

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Now here’s a feature that has to be included in the Canon EOS 5D Mark III – I think you’ll agree (said with sarcasm) – the Panasonic DMC-FX77 that was announced on Friday has a “beauty re-touch” mode that will ‘virtually make up faces’ – including whitening teeth and clearing skin. I know this isn’t ‘HDSLR’ news, but geez, could something like this be coming eventually to HDSLRs?

The Panasonic description of beauty re-touching

The Beauty Retouch Mode makes it possible to virtually makeup the faces. Various effects can be applied to the face including clearing the skin texture, whitening teeth and so on. You can also choose the color of foundation, lips, cheeks or eye-shadow. The Art Retouch Mode makes it easy to retouch color effects to match your intent.

From this page:
The Art Retouch function offers the options to add different impressions to an image, brightness can be changed with exposure adjustment and the colour with saturation control. Additional modes include, The Beauty Retouch mode which cosmetically enhances faces in the photos. In Aesthetic mode, various effects can be applied to the face including clearing the skin texture, lifting up the face, whitening of teeth and so on. Finally, in the Make-up mode for additional effect, the colour of foundation, lips, cheeks or eye-shadow can be selected.

Someone who wants it

“Though Yunkoro is proud of her photographic skill, additional help has arrived on the scene from Japanese electronics maker Panasonic Corp — a camera that can brush up, clean up and even put make-up on the subject’s face.

The LUMIX FX77, released last Friday, has a “beauty re-touch” function that will whiten your teeth, increase the translucency of your skin, remove dark eye circles, make your face look smaller and even magnify the size of your eyes.

For the final touch, it will apply rouge, lipstick and even eye shadow.

There has been huge customer demand for such a product, said Akiko Enoki, a Panasonic project manager in charge of developing the camera.

“According to data we’ve acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,” she said.

“So we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don’t like about their faces after they’ve taken the picture.””

Wow is about all I can say – what do you think? Sound off in the comments!